Scaling Human Systems: Alignment

An important lens for thinking about organizations at this stage of growth is alignment. In an organization which is aligned, the efforts of different people and teams all contribute to forward progress in a shared direction. If two teams are pulling in opposite directions they may make little progress despite great effort, and quickly become frustrated. To take an obvious example, if a marketing team is targeting an audience of large enterprises while the product being developed is only suited for small businesses, the end result of both teams doing a good job will be a failure (i.e. unhappy customers).

It’s important to note that alignment does not imply sameness. Different teams within an organization can function and behave very differently while still being strongly aligned with each other.

When an organization is small, alignment comes naturally. Everyone has some visibility on what everyone else is doing, and when something doesn’t line up, the people involved can talk it over and resolve the issue relatively easily. But as the organization grows, the propensity for misalignment increases, and these situations become much more difficult and time-consuming to resolve. The metaphor of the right hand, which doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, seems like something that would only happen in larger companies, but it begins much earlier, especially when the company goes through a period of rapid growth. Critical infrastructure, such as communication tools and patterns, lags behind the accelerating needs of the people involved, creating a surprising distance between teams.

Organizational alignment is a critical part of scaling successfully. With alignment, growth and momentum are assets. Without it, they are liabilities.